With more than two-dozen full-time and reserve police officers attending in uniform, which the chairman called an “intimidation” tactic, and stories of life and death mixing with financial crisis, Wednesday night’s Board of Selectmen meeting was a highly charged affair.

With more than two-dozen full-time and reserve police officers attending in uniform, which the chairman called an “intimidation” tactic, and stories of life and death mixing with financial crisis, Wednesday night’s Board of Selectmen meeting was a highly charged affair.

Sgt. Todd Costa told Selectmen Chairman Donald Setters he was “insulted” by the suggestion that wearing his blues was an act of intimidation, before Setters asked him why the officers came dressed that way on a night the board was to address “police minimum staffing levels.”

Police officers took up virtually every seat in the Town Hall meeting room and sat through five minutes of silence before the meeting adjourned to the larger Old Town Hall on the other side of the public library.

Costa, following Chief Joseph Ferreira’s and Lt. Jeffrey Cote’s presentation on the importance of retaining the full police complement, told his own harrowing story of becoming a police officer 21 years ago.

Responding alone to the old 4-D Motel, where suspects in a house break-in were reportedly holed up, Costa said the 2-on-1 advantage of the suspects “resulted in a battle for my life.” If not for an IRS special agent seeing Costa’s predicament and running across the Route 6 parking lot to help him, Costa said he could have been killed when a suspect went for his gun.

His only backup was on the other side of town.

These days, Town Administrator Dennis Luttrell said, the “minimum manning,” by contract, for police shifts is two patrolmen on the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift and three each on the 4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m. shifts.

About 20 years ago, after the motel incident, Costa said former Chief James Smith told the Board of Selectmen about the dangers police officers faced.

“From that time on, there’s been three men on the road for the Somerset Police Department,” Costa said.

Turning to his police colleagues — before storming out of the hall — he said there were “hundreds of years of experience in this room that know we can’t operate safely without three men on the road.”

That has the potential to change after Wednesday night’s split vote by the Board of Selectmen.

Setters and Selectman Scott Lebeau made detailed and impassioned pleas for why cutbacks for all departments are essential in the wake of losing more than half of the power plant revenues that once approached $15 million a year.

“We can sugar-coat this all we want — the town is not in the position it was five years, 10 years, 15 years ago,” Lebeau said.

“I applaud you for the service you do for the community. But next week, the school teachers will be here ... and then the fire department will come in here and say they can’t make concessions.”

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Lebeau said he researched towns with similar 15,000 to 19,000 populations and said there were 31 in the state. “We were the only department with a complement of 32,” he said, adding, “We’re trying to balance the money with the services we provide.”

One resident, Dennis Sullivan, a town businessman who said he can manage the $1,000 tax hike he expects next year, complimented the police department on its management, training and service.

He also supported the points Lebeau and Setters were making.

“The reality is, we can’t afford it,” said Sullivan, who lives on New Hampshire Avenue. While he can afford the tax hike, he said others he knows “will be forced out or, God forbid, have to go to Fall River.”

With Selectman Patrick O’Neil opposed, the board voted 2-1 to reduce minimum staffing requirements to two patrolmen on each of the three shifts, subject to impact bargaining with the police union. Each shift has a shift commander.

Setters said several times that the board’s decision, which needs union approval, “is the minimum … It’s not required the minimum be adhered to.”

O’Neil said the issue is not about reducing manning requirements, but that the 32-person department may not be sustainable. “We’re going to have cuts in the police department. We’re going to have cuts across the board.”

“I’m not ever going to be bound by two officers,” Ferreira said in an interview after the vote. He said it is his call on how to deploy the force within the given budget.

Setters said several times that the board’s decision, which needs union approval, “is the minimum … It’s not required the minimum be adhered to.”

Ferreira also told selectmen that he is ready, for the first time in more than a dozen years, to remove the department’s school resource officer at the regional high school and deploy him to cover shifts in order to save overtime while vacancies remain.

He did not have a timetable, but said in the interview it could happen as soon as today if the need arose.

The shift minimum is a huge issue, but Ferreira described a workload handled by a department already down three full-time officers from its budgeted complement of 32, and which could lose another three next year if vacancies are not filled.

“Never in my history have I seen it so bad,” Ferreira said.

Before selectmen acted, Ferreira made his case in financial terms, then described the toll it’s taking on the force.

Of course, the recent death of Patrolman B.J. Voss after the junior officer worked a 15-hour shift was fresh on townspeople’s minds. Ferreira nearly gave a minute-by-minute rundown of a myriad of emergency calls, ranging from drug activity to a baby who had stopped breathing, to conclude that Voss’s last day was “15 hours of high stress and high adrenalin.”

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He also claimed that “95 percent” of about 300 voters at the annual Town Meeting in May voted in favor of restoring $100,000 for the full 32-officer complement, and not to cut two officers.

Lt. Jeffrey Cote, a 32-year officer, told selectmen, “I see it every day, officers that are overly stressed and overly fatigued.”

Setters and Lebeau did not back down from the officers, whose emotions ranged from impassioned to confrontational.

“I think if people had known what was going on financially in the town, it would have been a very different town meeting,” Setters said.

At one point, in a tense and non-stop debate that lasted more than an hour, Lebeau asked an emotional Sgt. Tracey Costa — who was close with Voss — what options she’d propose for not filling officer vacancies to avoid laying them off later.

“As long as you’re clear that if something happens, you can look my kid in the face,” Tracey Costa said.